Tag Archives: climate change

Love, Weather, and Mindfulness



I recently saw a local production of the rock musical, Hair, which was a Broadway hit in 1968.  I first saw it in the early 1970s, performed by a travelling troupe in a “Broadway at Duke” series.  I liked it so much then that I bought the album, but I didn’t remember that the show was about a “tribe” of hippies whose leader, Claude, was considering burning his draft card in protest against the Vietnam war.

They use the word “love” a lot in Hair, and on this viewing, the opening song, “Aquarius” brought tears to my eyes.:  “When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planet, and love will steer the stars.  This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius . . .”

It reminded me I have the moon in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars.  I didn’t know that in the 1970s, but peace and love are guiding principles of my life, although no one would suspect it, not even me, sometimes.

At the end of Hair, the protagonist, Claude, after deciding not to burn his draft card, gets drafted, goes to Vietnam, and gets killed.  I commented to friends afterwards that we have come no closer to peace and love since the 1960s and 1970s, when kids our age were so idealistic.  We as a generation have become jaded.  The death of our hopes may have been predicted by Claude’s death in Vietnam.  But the Age of Aquarius is just beginning, and astrological ages last 2000-2500 years, so there’s still time for peace and love to evolve.

A few days later, in Barnes & Noble, I encountered a cute black man at the condiments bar.  I was complaining about the hot weather. He said something about cold, and I said I prefer cold to hot.  He said it’s “God’s weather.”  Later I thought “How quaint,” but at the time, I replied rain and breeze are God’s weather, too.

Yes, it’s all God’s weather, even climate change.  As I’ve become more attuned to the infinite and subtle variations, moment-to-moment in the “climate” of my environment, I’ve come to appreciate how useless weather predictions are.  A 90-degree day can feel hotter if the sun is intense, the air humid and still, or even if there’s machine noise or mosquitoes.  All increase levels of discomfort.

I avoid thinking in terms of God, but it’s convenient for encompassing ideas of totality.  All-That-Is, Seth’s (of the Jane Roberts’ series) name, carries less baggage, and Westerners don’t understand the Oriental concept of qi.  For me, this totality equates to the energy of universal love, pervasive love, all-inclusive love—an Aquarian concept–but “love” is another baggage-loaded term.

According to Seth, to some Native American traditions, and to the mystically inclined, the weather responds to human thought and will.  In order to hone my climate-changing skills, I figure, my intent must be clear and considerate of all who are affected by it.  To pray for rain, as former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue did, could cause flash floods in the mountains.  To ask for weather that makes everyone more comfortable implies rain without telling “God’s weather” how to achieve it.  Cloud cover, breeze, rain, nightfall—all these make everyone more comfortable.


Along these lines, I looked at a special issue of Time on “Mindfulness” and noticed this is the cover subject of National Geographic, too.  There is so much attention given to this lately that I find it amusing, in a smugly cynical way.  It smacks of “Agenda” from the urbanites, who are suddenly praising the benefits of office plants to relieve stress.

There were multiple references to “we all,” who feel stressed by competing demands on attention and how TV news is depressing, but “The Agenda” doesn’t suggest turning off the TV.  No.  Even Psychiatric News, which expresses concern about loneliness, suicide, and the overuse of social media, only calls for increased funding for treatment.

I also read some of the National Geographic issue on mindfulness.  The entire issue was apparently written by some life coach type who fills it with mindfulness rules, or guidelines that structure every minute of the day, from wake-up until bed.  While some of the ideas are good, the slant was one of goals and performance.  The practical value of hugging (releases oxytocin, the emotion hormone, we are told), gratitude, volunteering in the community, eye contact and presence were stressed. It impressed me in one specific way when it recommended being grateful.  Awareness of gratitude implies appreciating the things that go right and shifts focus away from worries and cares.


Animals are mindfulness gurus, but nothing I read mentioned that.  While “The Agenda” wants to sell mindfulness through teachers, courses, methods, books, videos, and apps, I think about all the ways it can be incorporated into daily routine.  Brushing teeth with the non-dominant hand comes to mind.  This is reminiscent of Carlos Casteneda’s Yaqui Indian mentor, don Juan, who recommended putting on the other shoe first, to make a conscious variation in a daily habit.

Seth of the Jane Roberts series recommends bringing mind back to the body, even for just a few seconds, to generate a sense of safety.  It’s a way of grounding oneself in the moment in space and time.  I’ve found that sitting at stop lights can provide opportunities for taking deep breaths and consciously relaxing tight body parts.  It seems driving has become more stressful over the years, with traffic heavier and more impatient.  Mindfulness is watching the chickens, or the clouds, or opening my senses while shutting off thought, which is easier said than done.

I realized while reading that these authors are at least a generation younger than I am, immersed in child rearing, work and other commitments, and don’t have the luxury of laziness.  But people my age and older, too, are imbued with the work ethic, which never retires.  Even I have a compelling need to “be productive,” to “make good use of time,” to “accomplish.”  Even when I’m lying on the lawn watching chickens, I’m “being mindful.”  Mindful is an ant crawling on my arm.  Mindful is anything that makes me uncomfortable.



Global Warmists and Thought Forms

The global warmists are making summer last too long.  Today, on September 29, a week after the autumnal equinox, the temperature at my house is over 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now the “scientists” of the world–in this latest religion of abstractions that supposedly controls the cosmos–agree that man is responsible for “climate change,” and we must do something about it.  Even the psychiatric establishment has linked arms with the “scientists” to advocate for a “call to action,” “educational initiatives,” “alliances with other organizations,” “leadership,” “evidence-based advances,” “special responsibility,” and “radical measures” to spread the word that climate change poses a threat to public health, including mental health,” according to the September 7 issue of Psychiatric News.

Well, the climate changes every day and every minute, and each square centimeter of the earth has a different climate.  This could be proven by sticking a thermometer in the ground or hanging it in a tree or dunking it in an ocean.  Where in this scenario is the climate not changing? This simplistic grasp of science is too easy for the “climate scientists” to comprehend.

The fundamental precepts of modern “science” require hypotheses that can be tested, according to the “scientific method.”  This method requires inclusion of a “control group,” which is identical to the test group but without the experimental intervention.  It also requires that the experiment must reduce variables to one, so that the test is high in selectivity and specificity.  That is, the test must measure what you want to measure (selectivity) and only that variable (specificity).

The notion that the climate is changing and that man is the cause, contains two hypotheses, neither of which is testable under the scientific method.  This makes it “political science,” which employs its own methods.

It is at least as valid for me to claim the global warmists are extending summer temperatures through misguided thought forms.  I’m not the first or only person to claim man can and does influence the weather through thought.  This was the province of the shaman in some tribal cultures, and the premise behind Native American rain dances, and of mystics and seers around the world.

The idea of “thought forms” was popularized in the book Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation by Annie Besant and CW Leadbetter, of the Theosophical Society, in 1901.  The book asserted that people’s thoughts, experiences, emotions, and music have an  ethereal substance that can be perceived by the psychically attuned.  The book contained paintings of thoughts related to devotion and devotion sacrifice, three types of anger, three types of love (undirected, directed, and grasping) and jealousy, intellect and ambition. The authors claimed that the quality of a person’s thought influences his life experience and can affect other people.  The book had a strong influence on modern art and literature.  Kandinsky, Yeats, TS Eliot, Malevich and Mondrain, especially, were charmed by Theosophy.  Wikipedia notes that Annie Besant and CW Leadbetter played a pivotal role in shaping the globalized culture of East-West mysticism and rationalism, sound and sight.

While the book refers specifically to individual thought forms, I’ve also read and believe there are group thought forms, too, akin to what psychiatrist Carl Jung called “archetypes,” “the collective unconscious,” or universal symbols.  It could be argued that the terms “most people” or “society,” or even “we” refer to a type of mass mind thought form, the generally accepted notion of what humanity as a whole is like, what it believes, or how it thinks.  Perhaps television or the mass media reflect the mass mind thought form and its assumptions.

It’s never clear how those who refer to “most people” arrive at their characterizations.  I know of no one who has interviewed “most people,” yet these terms slide easily off lips and are just as easily accepted.  Who are these nameless, faceless, creatures so easily packaged into stereotypes such as “liberal,” “conservative,” “black,” “white,” and all the labels “we” use to lump individuals together in so much featureless protoplasm?

The “scientists” only acknowledge what they can perceive with the five senses they admit to, or with sense-extenders, like microscopes or spectroscopy.  They have yet to prove life exists, or that the mind exists, and they have yet to prove the universe has only three dimensions.

If the mind exists, I would dearly love to see the “climate scientists” use theirs to bring fall weather to my back yard.

A Stinky Subject

This isn’t about sex, murder, war, politics, or Donald Trump, so if that’s all that interests you, you may as well stop reading now.  It’s about landfill gas recapture and utilization, a subject that makes my engineering friends yawn but fascinates me.

It links my interests in environmental toxins, garbage disposal, and multi-purpose innovation to address commonly acknowledged problems.  While the political scientists debate whether the Earth is undergoing “climate change” and, if so, whether humankind is causing it, I’m looking at litter in the streets; noting the extraordinary growth of plastic and single use packaging; and throwing away heaps of junk mail in post office recycling bins.  At least the PO has recycling bins, a forward shift in consciousness, according to me, within the past ten years.  Not only does the post office subsidize this mountain of murdered trees by reduced rates, but my various alma maters and professional organizations are the worst perpetrators of this global plot to deforest the planet and speed up the global warming agenda.  One would think the ivory-tower elitists would be the first to rail against this glut of self-serving propaganda, but alas, they can’t afford to support their tenured positions and building campaigns with mere tuitions.  They must perpetually dun their graduates—and their graduates’ offspring—for money, if only to prove how cost-ineffective and eco-unfriendly they are.

So, rather than spend money supporting those who can’t support themselves, I choose to educate myself without cost in ways to reduce all my problems and the world’s problems at the same time.  A tall order, perhaps, and maybe a futile one, considering the stinky subject of landfill.  Nobody wants to touch it, unless, of course they can get government funding.

To get government funding, one is obliged to package the idea in terms that make the government look good.  For instance, did you know the United States has 2000 regulated landfills, the most in the world?  By 2006, the US generated 413 million tons of municipal solid waste, and 64% went into landfill.  70 percent of this was composed of food, paper, and corrugated cardboard, and 15 percent was of petrochemicals, mostly plastic.

Biogas, including carbon dioxide and methane, are emitted from decomposition of organic materials in landfill.  Aerobic decomposition of waste generally leads to the production of carbon dioxide (CO2), and anaerobic decomposition produces methane (CH4). Methane is also known as natural gas. MSW (municipal solid waste) landfill gas is comprised of 45-60% methane and 40-60% CO2.

Methane is believed to be at least 24 times more potent than carbon dioxide in its global warming effects.  About 50 million tons of methane are generated annually by municipal solid waste, but only 5 million tons are captured.

Landfills generate a maximum of methane at five years, then the amount begins to decline.  Landfill gas utilization is a process by which methane is captured and used to generate electricity or heat, or upgraded for inclusion in commercial natural gas products.  In 2006, there were 325 landfills in the US that collected biogas, up from 231 in 1999.  California had the most:  65 landfill gas facilities, followed by Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania.  In 2001, there were 955 landfills that recovered biogas, with the most in the United States, followed by Germany and the United Kingdom.  In the United Kingdom, the number of facilities went from 329 in 2005 to 519 in 2009.

There are two methods for capture of methane from landfill, closed and open capture.  Closed capture refers to gas extraction from landfills that have been closed and can be capped.  It is considered more efficient than capture from open landfills, at 84% and 67% respectively.  Methods for capture including drilling wells either vertically or horizontally.  Equipment needed for utilization depends on the size of the landfill.  Smaller facilities can employ reciprocating engines; medium-sized facilities can use turbines; and steam cycles are used for the largest deposits.

General Motors has significantly reduced its energy costs by using landfill gas to power some of its production facilities.  As of August, 2016, the General Motors Orion plant in the Orion Township of Michigan boasted that landfill gas was supplying 54% of its electricity.  The gas comes from two open landfills nearby, owned by Waste Management and Republic Services, respectively.  The GM plant also has a 350 kW solar array.

There are incentives from the Treasury Department, Department of Energy, the Agriculture Department, and the Department of Commerce for landfill gas extraction.  Landfill gas is considered a renewable form of energy.  The US EPA operates a landfill Methane Outreach Program.

Opponents of landfill gas utilization include such organizations as the Energy Justice Network, which claims that landfill gas has contaminants that are either inherently toxic or combine into toxic substances when burned.  Although “non-methane organic compounds” (NMOCs) comprise less than one percent of landfill gas, there are also non-organic toxic substances, such as mercury and tritium, in minute amounts.  Also, when halogens–like chlorine, fluorine, and bromine– are combusted with hydrocarbons, they can produce dioxins and furans, some of the most toxic substances known.  While other sources state that a burning temperature of 850 degrees centigrade can destroy dioxins, Energy Justice Network claims these can be re-formed in the cooling process.

At the same time, Energy Justice Network admits that methane is responsible for 10.6 percent of global warming from US human sources, with 35.8 percent of this from landfill gas.  It also claims that if landfill gas is to be utilized for energy, boilers offer the safest mode, with turbines, then internal combustion engines less desirable.










What is Truth? What is Real?



















In Defense of Carbon














CH4 + 2O2 –>  CO2 + 2H2O







Political Climate Change

I’ve followed the “global warming,” then the “climate change” controversy for a number of years and have a number of reservations about the terms being used, the focus on “greenhouse gases,” and the almost religious fervor “climate scientists” adopt when pushing their agenda.

I’m an amateur scientist, at best, a “life scientist,” who still believes observation is the best science there is.  I can’t deny the environment is changing, becoming de-vitalized, and I also believe mankind plays a significant role.  That and other transgressions against fellow man and nature have made me ashamed to be human. I look to my pets and nature to restore my belief that nature will survive, even if humans poison or nuke themselves out of existence.  It may take awhile, and the earth may generate a variety of mutant life forms, but nature will win in the end. Best to make a friend of her.

While I am no scientist, I’ve taken more undergraduate and post graduate science courses than most Americans have.  I’ve taken biology, botany, inorganic and organic chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and a variety of medical science courses. I’ve done published research, too.  The last showed me the limitations of the “scientific method,” which assumes cause and effect and must control for variables. The primary rule in Western scientific research is that you can have no more than one variable.  You begin with a hypothesis that you want to prove or disprove.  You “control” for variables, meaning you have a treatment group and a “control group.” In other words, you create artificial circumstances to suit your study design and outcome you want or expect.

Contrast this with the Oriental pattern-based approach, which embraces variables and looks for patterns among them.  The presumption is nature is composed of interactive processes that enhance or mitigate each other.  Everything is connected in a large, multi-dimensional web.

When it comes to the environment, it’s impossible to limit research to one variable and determine cause and effect.  We know what came before, and we use computer models to predict what will come next.  We want to attribute causes to “climate change,” and have focused on CO2 and other “greenhouse gases,” specifically methane/natural gas (CH4).

I contend this is too simplistic.  First we are technically at the end of an ice age, so planetary warming is at least partly natural.  Carbon is the basic building block of life, an element, that can combine with many other atoms to create a variety of molecules.  The difference between inorganic and organic chemistry is based on whether the substance under study has carbon.  Methane/natural gas is the simplest hydro-carbon there is.  It is part of the life-cycle, and every decaying life form produces it.  Cow farts (which have been blamed for adding to greenhouse gases) and human farts all contain methane, as do other life form farts.  It rises from the marsh and from landfill.

Carbon dioxide, CO2, the demonized poster child of the “climate science” religion, is the chief nutrient of plant photosynthesis, the process that combines carbon from the air with light to create food for the plant, and thus for every creature that eats plants.  Carbon dioxide comprises significantly less than one percent of the atmosphere.  By comparison, oxygen makes up 21 percent.  If carbon dioxide is the primary culprit in climate change, then overpopulation, with more people exhaling CO2 and farting methane, is a significant factor in the production of greenhouse gases CO2 and methane.

No one of the scientists has addressed the fact that burning one molecule of methane/natural gas (CH4) produces two molecules of water for every one of CO2. Apparently none of the computer models programmed to track carbon emissions and predict climate change factors in the enormous amount of water added to the environment with the burning of fossil fuels.  Water vapor is another “greenhouse gas” in fact, as anyone who has ever visited a greenhouse knows.  What is the effect of cloud cover on the earth below?  What is the effect of all the mass of buildings, highways, and parking lots?  These have replaced forests and fields, which played a role in keeping the earth cool and absorbing rainwater before it flooded.  Has anyone accounted for the thermals (vortexes of hot air rising from cities) creating fronts that change weather patterns all around?

The Industrial Revolution begun with the cheap abundance of coal and is intricately intertwined with its advance.  This closely followed major other changes in paradigms, specifically Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity, and the subsequent mechanistic view of the universe.  The mechanistic paradigm brought “determinism,” which separated life (and god) from science.  The idea that the universe functions like a machine, with everything governed by knowable physical laws, contradicted the Biblical presumption of free will.

We have made a quantum leap from Newtonian physics with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.  At the atomic and subatomic level, there is enormous variation and spontaneity within a larger order.  All of a sudden, free will becomes scientifically valid again, the experimenter does influence the experiment by expectation or desire, and cause-and-effect paradigms begin to lose relevance.

I’m more concerned about the effects of environmental toxins than the buildup of greenhouse gases.  The industrial revolution has led to unsustainable levels of toxic waste in air, water, and land, and we continue to dump poisons way worse than carbon dioxide into the world environment.  We are poisoning ourselves along with the insects, but insects reproduce faster and develop immunity quicker than human beings do.  Plastic, also containing hydrocarbon chains, release toxic chemicals, especially when heated, that Americans blithely drink in their bottled water.  We’re increasingly afraid of tap water because of contaminants in pipes and groundwater that we’re only beginning to recognize.

Yes, we are devitalizing and perhaps even killing the earth, but we need to broaden our scope to look at multi-factorial contributors.  It’s not a government problem to solve.  We should look to ourselves as individuals, a nation of excess and waste. Don’t depend too much on salaried scientists, whose primary obligation is to their government, university, and corporate employers.  They agree with each other in finding simple targets and ignoring the greater industrial pollution that continues as fast as it can generate profits on Wall Street.